The last time the landlords wrote a proposition for us here in California it permanently broke local services and education in this state and left homeowners paying for it. We’ve got a bigger problem now: Prop. 98.

This one is important if you rent, or care about people who do. gordonzola has a good summation at his LJ today, but the jist of it is:

Prop. 98 kills all rent control, removes many of California’s protections for tenants, repeals environmental rules, and trashes public water projects.

For a more detailed summary with arguments for and against the proposition, Smart Voter has a Proposition 98 page and links to the actual law.

15 responses to “ATTENTION CALIFORNIA VOTERS: No on 98”

I don’t know much about California property laws, but that don’t look right to me either.

What also bothers me is the increasingly prevalent tendency to label people who are “bad guys” as terrorists. I’m not a supporter of people who rob banks, but bank robbers are not terrorists. Terrorists do what they do to scare the ever-loving shit out of people so they can’t function and then will accede to some list of demands; sort of a hostage-taking on a grand scale. Bank robbers really just want your money and are quite happy to leave you alone once they’ve gotten away with it.

Labelling political opponents as terrorists is really taking it to the next level. How, exactly, is Mrs. Lumpkin in 3B who enjoys her rent-controlled apartment to be compared with the Baader-Meinhof or ETA?

Yup. We have to raise rents to keep the murderers, rapists, child molesters and welfare folk out of our communities. Raising rent means only people of quality settle in our neighborhoods.

Nevermind the people being foreclosed on who need to find rental properties and will have to pay whatever we want to charge them, and I mean, its not like we are in a recession and people need affordable housing or anything, our glorious president told us so.

I’m sure keeping marraige “traditional” can be thrown in there somewhere.

Also, if you kill Rent Control, you will be killing San Francisco— yes, the whole city— grinding up its corpse, and using it to make Sausage McDisney BurgerLord Hell™.

Now, some of you reading this in SoCal will shed no tears about that, but think carefully: do you really want a bunch of disaffected San Francisco eviction refugees descending on your carefully tended SoCal lifestyles? Can you really stand that many Trotskyists in your neighborhoods? Trust me, SoCal— you really, really, REALLY want to keep San Francisco the way it is— it’s for your own good. You will not like what will happen if you fuck with The System.

SFO isn’t unique, but its rent control ordnances aren’t all that common elsewhere in California. I can only think of two or three cities in the bay area with similar provisions. In SoCal, I think there are some places with similar regs, but I’d be surprised if they covered a significant fraction of the rental units over the expanse of the whole Southland. Did something change recently that I missed? I would have expected a major overhaul of the rent control regime in Southern California couldn’t be possible without a bourgeois riot down there.

If I recall correctly, LB has similarly good protections. Basically, everywhere else in SoCal your landlord has you by the short ones. The one time I was evicted, it was in Menlo Park, with 30-days notice. No cause required by the landlord. She just decided she wanted to rent to someone else. I was screwed.